DropDownListFor not preselecting value

I'm building an MVC web application and am about to run my head through the wall, there's a dozen topics on this already and all have accepted solutions that do not work for me. There's probably something really stupid and simple I'm forgetting/not seeing, but can't seem to work it out.
Please don't hate me for naming; I'm continuing a project started by someone else.

This builds a selectbox based on property Model.ChecklistWaarde.SoortID, which is an integer. The next parameter passed is a SelectList from the model that is generated by the following very simple helper function that does a DB lookup in a 2ndary database (unfortunately), it receives the parameter SoortID as well to set a preselect value:

When I try to debug my code, I can see that the model values are populated correctly:

SoortID

has a value of 2 (

int

)

Model.ChecklistOptionsOptions

has a populated

SelectLis

t

Upon inspecting the

SelectList

I find that only item with value "2" has property

Selected = true

, this is

false

for all others.

When the form gets rendered, it will not select the item with value 2, rather it will have the first item selected, "Choose a value"

Inspecting the HTML, I see that the item with value 2 is indeed not selected, contrary to what I was expecting (see HTML below; shorted the list in count and text for readability). I expected to see "selected" on the line for item 2, as it was selected in the

or you could elminate SelectList and instead in your model change the property ChecklistOptionsOptions type to List<SelectListItem>, in that case the last line of creating SelectList will not be required further, right now you are creating it multiple times.